Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Adventure Time: JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND

There was no good reason to get excited about Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. It’s a
late arriving sequel to the little-loved 2008 family movie Journey to the Center of the Earth, a loose adaptation of the Jules
Verne classic. It was a cheesy, erratic, CGI monstrosity that took full, sloppy,
insufferable advantage of the then-novelty of a 3D resurgence. Of that movie I
can only recall a mugging Brendan Fraser and a moment in which Seth Meyers
smirks as he thrusts a tape measure out of the screen. Having seen this new
movie, I must admit that my reticence was unfounded. Journey 2 is a fun time at the movies, a gee-whiz spectacle made
with great energy and an authentic, pleasing sense of adventure.

Ditching just about everything that made up its predecessor
up to and including the writers, the director, and most of the cast, Journey 2 makes it nice and easy to
recommend ignoring its sequel status and jumping right in. It doesn’t take much
time at all for the script by Brian and Mark Gunn to get the plot off and
running. A teenage boy who considers himself an explorer (Josh Hutcherson)
convinces his stepfather (Dwayne Johnson) to help him try to find The
Mysterious Island. You know, the one that Jules Verne wrote about.

This island has to be real since the boy has picked up a
coded message transmitted from the middle of nowhere that has to be, just has
to be, from his missing grandfather (Michael Caine). Proving the existence of
this island was the old man’s life’s work. I like how the kid figures out where
the secret message originates by casting aside his iPad and paging through
dusty volumes of fantasy literature and comparing the map inside The Mysterious Island with the ones
inside Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island. You see, these maps all
have clues as to finding the actual Mysterious Island, because, why not?

Sensing an opportunity to bond with his stepson, the trip is
planned. Stepfather and stepson hitch a ride on a rickety helicopter with the
owner (Luis Guzman) and his plucky teenaged daughter (Vanessa Hudgens). They
all get sucked into a swirling storm cloud that deposits them onto the unknown
shores of Mysterious Island. There they find grandpa of course, as well as
gigantic bugs, gargantuan lizards, and miniature elephants. It’s a veritable
phantasmagoric jungle menagerie of identifiable beasts in unexpected sizes. The
movie is little more than these broadly sketched and immensely likable characters
hiking through the jungle and encountering these strange sights. “You should
have expected mysterious things,” the stepson tells his stepfather. “It’s in
the title.”

This group is made up of easily identifiable types played
with earnest, affable verve. The boy adventurer, the strong-but-kind muscle
man, the white-haired veteran explorer, the pretty girl, and the comic relief
are imbued with characteristics that bounce off each other in ways that are the
right mix of predictable and comfortable. With someone as charismatic and
charming as Dwayne Johnson, the other actors are left scrambling to win audiences’
affection. The effort pays off. I found I liked spending time with them as they
spend their screen time marveling at strange sights and running away from them
when things get dangerous, all the while trying to find a way off this island
without getting stomped on, eaten up, or submerged under water.

The movie is a particularly enjoyable version of this particular
kind of movie, the kind of movie that gets a kick out of giants beasts lumbering
about and flying around in classic Ray Harryhausen style, albeit in a
just-convincing-enough modern CGI fashion instead of that special effects
master’s use of stop-motion animation. (In fact, Harryhausen did the effects
for a 1961 adaptation of The Mysterious
Island, a film I absolutely need to see). Director Brad Peyton (who made
his directorial debut in 2010 with Cats
& Dogs 2, which is best forgotten) handles the large-scale effects and
the swift script with a nice, unhurried style. It’s just plain sturdy adventure
filmmaking. It’s bright, colorful, and energetic with big monsters, beautiful
scenery, and an exuberant and agreeable use of 3D effects. (Objects noticeably
pop out and extend backwards without being too distracting). It’s a B-movie matinee right out of the
1950s when it would have been called something like a boy’s adventure story and
played to theaters of happy children on a Saturday afternoon.

The fact of the matter is, that I saw this movie in a
theater filled with happy children just last Saturday afternoon. They howled
and giggled and exclaimed right on cue. Reader, I could totally see where they
were coming from. The fact of the matter is, the movie just plain works. This
is not an especially ambitious movie, but it’s a satisfying one for what it is.
It’s good-natured and sweet, with a relaxed sense of humor that’s only
sometimes too easy or corny. It’s silly and it knows it. The movie comes with a
nice family-friendly moral without becoming moralizing, with zippy action
sequences that are exciting without becoming frightening. What can I say? It
put a big goofy grin on my face.

"The movie theater is a sanctuary, where the outside world should be allowed admittance only through the images and sounds on screen and the way they resonate in the privacy of one’s own mind." - Dennis Cozzalio